The subtitle is The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, not The Search for the Origin of Viruses. It would be a pointless charade to observe virology experts at work in the lab, given that the authors have already summarized their findings in great detail with thorough citations -- none of which Hiltzik disputes.

Hiltzik is clearly suggesting that readers should feel cheated here. A wild goose chase is a complicated, hopeless pursuit. But the authors never promised they would solve the mystery of the origin of COVID-19. Their thesis, quite clearly from the start, is that an entire broad category of theories --zoonotic origin theories with no virology lab intermediary-- is highly implausible. That is what they argued. In comparison, when a defense lawyer proves their client is innocent of a murder, it is not logical or fair to expect them to go further and prove the guilt of the true murderer, and indeed no justice system in the world demands as much. That being said, the authors of Viral do go further; they argue that the virus or a near ancestor leaked from one of the two Wuhan Virology Institute locations in Wuhan. They also explained why the CCP's (undisputed) withholding of data blocks the investigating process from narrowing in on a detailed narrative of exactly how the leak happened.

for - autopoiesis - rhetoric - negentropic

from - https://hyp.is/uc2TdgZAEe-g9ldRm11tQA/www.google.com/search?q=applying+nagarjuna+to+penetrate+the+circularity+of+language&sca_esv=f3a10901b51afbdb&sxsrf=ACQVn09m0Xq0UJifhB2MGXO1HNWdkYPGjA:1714198161525&ei=kZYsZsTQH_GVxc8P7O2K2AM&udm=&oq=applying+nagarjuna+to+penetrate+the+circularity+of+language&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIjthcHBseWluZyBuYWdhcmp1bmEgdG8gcGVuZXRyYXRlIHRoZSBjaXJjdWxhcml0eSBvZiBsYW5ndWFnZTIIECEYoAEYwwRIvaEDUKhuWMmTA3ADeACQAQCYAfIDoAGSTaoBCDItMS4yMS42uAEDyAEA-AEBmAIMoAKuHMICChAAGLADGNYEGEfCAgQQHhgKwgIKECEYoAEYwwQYCpgDAIgGAZAGBJIHBzMuMy01LjSgB-Uz&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp

Fry, Ron. Write Papers. 2nd ed. Ron Fry’s How to Study Program. Hawthorne, NJ: Career Pr Inc, 1994. https://archive.org/details/writepapers00fryr/page/46/mode/2up

he challenges the state by showing his own personal emotion rather than ritual in grieving for his mum

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/28/desantis-republicans-china-ccp/

Notes from event on 2023-09-07

Used as part of the Carolingian educational program (rhetoric)

As of 2023, it's the oldest codex manuscript in Philadelphia

Formerly part of the (Thomas) Phillipps Collection (MSS Phillips appears on p1); see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Phillipps

There is some green highlighting on portions of the text

contains some marginalia and interlineal notations

Periermenias is the Greek title

Underdotting of some of the letters is used to indicate deletion of the text (used like striking out text today)

There are two sets of Carolingian script in the book, likely by different hands/times.

Shows prick marks in parchment for drawing lines to write evenly.

Has a few diagrams: squares of opposites (philosophy); color was added in XI C or possibly later

folio 45 switch to newer MS copy to continue text

Poem in last few lines with another text following it

parchment is smaller in one section at the end.

Another poem and then a letter to an abbott with a few pages in between (likely misbound) - quire of 12

Book starts with grammar, then Boethius translation of Aristotle, and then a letter. This could be an example of the trivium put together purposely for pedagogy sake, though we're missing all of their intended purpose (it wasn't written down).

Audience and Tone

Zettelkasten Lesson Plan Intro

Not much here beyond his longer article, though it does have a sample format for zettel which can be useful for those starting out.

link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/ZeZEgNm8Ee2woUds5QzgOw<br /> - https://hypothes.is/a/hkyPEtm9Ee21MFP9ynnj0g

Finding something to say within a zettelkasten-based writing framework is relatively easy. One is regularly writing down their ideas with respect to other authors as part of "the great conversation" and providing at least a preliminary arrangement. As part of their conversation they're putting these ideas into words right from the start.

These all follow the basic pillars of classic rhetoric, though one might profitably take their preliminary written notes and continue refining the arrangement as well as the style of the writing as they proceed to finished product.

Going back at least as far as the rhetoric of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, we recognize that while sets of rules can be helpful to the student, these must also be paired with ample imitation and practice.

Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. 1st (Second Printing). 1965. Reprint, Oxford University Press, 1966.

reply to u/apricotsareweird at r/Zettelkasten - How best to incorporate a book of terms?

This sounds a bit like it might fit into the mold of an example like Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's "Oblique Strategies" which are bits of creative advice that one draws out at random to help improve their work. You could have a custom deck for potential writing work and attempt the recipes at random to see where it takes you. At worst a collection of them could be used for spaced repetition to memorize or familiarize yourself with them. At a later date you could give them numbers and install them into a larger collection, but keeping them as a stand alone collection certainly couldn't hurt at least to start.

Of course, some of the private, individual practice can be terribly formed and generally useless for many, so it becomes imperative that students have some strong modeling here from the rhetorical side. What exactly do "good" and "useful" practices look like? How are these annotations used after-the-fact? What purposes do they serve? Can they be reused? Even with open annotations, there is still a lot of additional practice and use which happens beyond the visible annotation which is hidden.

How can we leverage the open annotation and the following process (for example that of Ahrens2017 or Eco2015, 1977) to show more of the workflows of not only learning/understanding/sensemaking, but then taking that material to apply, analyze, evaluate, and then subsequently create new material?

I see a lot of this sort of community sensemaking in the fora for digital note taking tools like Roam Research, Obsidian, Tana, etc. People there may sometimes be more focused on workflows for productivity sake, but there's a lot of subtle learning about note taking practice which is also going on between the lines.

Google translation:

The sheer quantity exceeds the possibilities of book publication, the complex, multidimensional structure of a networked information base cannot be reproduced in print, and finally the dynamic of a constantly growing and constantly correcting material does not fit into the rigid rhythm of book production, in which each expanded and corrected new edition is associated with an incalculable amount of effort. A book publication could only offer a snapshot of such a database, reduced to a specific perspective. This too can be very useful from time to time, but it does not solve the problem of publishing the entire material.

While the writing criticism of "dumping out one's zettelkasten" into a paper, journal article, chapter, book, etc. has been reasonably frequent in the 20th century, often as a means of attempting to create a linear book-bound context in a local neighborhood of ideas, are there other more complex networks of ideas which we're not communicating because they don't neatly fit into linear narrative forms? Is it possible that there is a non-linear form(s) based on network theory in which more complex ideas ought to better be embedded for understanding?

Some of Niklas Luhmann's writing may show some of this complexity and local or even regional circularity, but perhaps it's a necessary means of communication to get these ideas across as they can't be placed into linear forms.

One can analogize this to Lie groups and algebras in which our reading and thinking experiences are limited only to local regions which appear on smaller scales to be Euclidean, when, in fact, looking at larger portions of the region become dramatically non-Euclidean. How are we to appropriately relate these more complex ideas?

What are the second and third order effects of this phenomenon?

An example of this sort of non-linear examination can be seen in attempting to translate the complexity inherent in the Wb (Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache) into a simple, linear dictionary of the Egyptian language. While the simplicity can be handy on one level, the complexity of transforming the entirety of the complexity of the network of potential meanings is tremendously difficult.

Consider how rhetorical analysis applies to alt-right political arguments. Alt-right arguments fail miserably under rhetorical analysis. Rhetorical analysis is a tool of academia. Therefore academia is inimical to the alt-right. Therefore, the alt-right will seek to weaken and impune academia. And this is in fact what they do.

Annotation and AI Starter Assignments<br /> by Jeremy Dean

• students as fact-checkers
• students as content experts
• students as editors

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_of_speech

https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/162-foundations-applications-of-humanities-analytics/segments/15635

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rDUREWVnEM

[Cicero], and Harry Caplan (1896-1980). Ad C. Herennium de Ratione Dicendi (Rhetorica Ad Herennium). Loeb Classical Library, 403. Harvard University Press, 1964.

anastrophe noun anas·​tro·​phe ə-ˈna-strə-(ˌ)fē : inversion of the usual syntactical order of words for rhetorical effect

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anastrophe

Henry David Thoreau repeated himself frequently in his journals. Damion Searls who edited an edition of his journals suggested that some of this repetition was for the beauty and pleasure of the act, but that in many examples his repetition was an act of drafting, revising, and constructing.

Scott Scheper has recommended finding the place in one's zettelkasten where one wants to install a card before writing it out. I believe (check this) that he does this in part to prevent one from repeating themselves, but one could use the opportunity and the new context that brings them to an idea again to rewrite or rework and expand on their ideas while they're so inspired.

Thoreau's repetition may have also served the idea of spaced repetition: reminding him of his thoughts as he also revised them. We'll need examples of this through his writing to support such a claim. As the editor of this volume indicates that he removed some of the repetition, it may be better to go back to original sources than to look for these examples here.

(This last paragraph on repetition was inspired by attempting to type a tag for repetition and seeing "spaced repetition" pop up. This is an example in my own writing practice where the serendipity of a previously tagged word auto-populating/auto-completing in my interface helps to trigger new thoughts and ideas from a combinatorial creativity perspective.)

https://readwriterespond.com/2022/11/commonplace-book-a-verb-or-a-noun/

Sometimes the root question is "what to I want to do this for?" Having an underlying reason can be hugely motivating.

Are you collecting examples of things for students? (seeing examples can be incredibly powerful, especially for defining spaces) for yourself? Are you using them for exploring a particular space? To clarify your thinking/thought process? To think more critically? To write an article, blog, or book? To make videos or other content?

Your own website is a version of many of these things in itself. You read, you collect, you write, you interlink ideas and expand on them. You're doing it much more naturally than you think.

I find that having an idea of the broader space, what various practices look like, and use cases for them provides me a lot more flexibility for what may work or not work for my particular use case. I can then pick and choose for what suits me best, knowing that I don't have to spend as much time and effort experimenting to invent a system from scratch but can evolve something pre-existing to suit my current needs best.

It's like learning to cook. There are thousands of methods (not even counting cuisine specific portions) for cooking a variety of meals. Knowing what these are and their outcomes can be incredibly helpful for creatively coming up with new meals. By analogy students are often only learning to heat water to boil an egg, but with some additional techniques they can bake complicated French pâtissier. Often if you know a handful of cooking methods you can go much further and farther using combinations of techniques and ingredients.

What I'm looking for in the reading, note taking, and creation space is a baseline version of Peter Hertzmann's 50 Ways to Cook a Carrot combined with Michael Ruhlman's Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. Generally cooking is seen as an overly complex and difficult topic, something that is emphasized on most aspirational cooking shows. But cooking schools break the material down into small pieces which makes the processes much easier and more broadly applicable. Once you've got these building blocks mastered, you can be much more creative with what you can create.

How can we combine these small building blocks of reading and note taking practices for students in the 4th - 8th grades so that they can begin to leverage them in high school and certainly by college? Is there a way to frame them within teaching rhetoric and critical thinking to improve not only learning outcomes, but to improve lifelong learning and thinking?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Frank

Like centuries of rhetors before him, he's using ideas and metaphors of harvest, treasure, and wealth to describe note taking.

Why have these passed out of popular Western thought since the 1920-1960s when this book was popular?

How did we shift from inter-related subjects and "one knowledge" of rhetoric in the Middle Ages to such strict departmentalization in the academy to only now be moving back toward multi-disciplinary research?

rewards for fast production (see influencer culture) can also be seen in the broader social media space which doesn't provide space for the depth of potential rhetoric of Harris' five "moves".

The Tolumin model is an evidence based method of teaching argumentation.

It seems broadly true in the new millennium and potentially much earlier that students are not taught broader reading strategies within academic settings. The history of note taking strategies and teaching would indicate that this wasn't always true.

In prior centuries there was more focus in earlier education on grounding in the trivium and quadrivium including rhetoric. These pieces and their fundamentals are now either glossed over or skipped altogether to focus more training on what might be considered more difficult and more important material. It would seem that educational reforms from the late 1500s shifted the focus on some of these prior norms to focus on other materials, and in particular reforms in the early 1900s (Charles William Eliot , et al) which focused on training a workforce for a more industrialized and capitalistic society weaned many of these methods out of earlier curricula. This results in students dramatically under-prepared for doctoral research, analysis, and writing.

After listing examples of the authors argument, they further go into it by stating their main question. It seems to be as if they want to know what's now currently happening to women and why is nothing being done about it.

the master of which his contemporary Johann Jacob Moser (1701-1785) proved to be. The technique used by the Swabian lawyer and writer to scramble is emphatic evidence of how you can turn excerpts from old books into new ones just by re-addressing them. According to his own admission, Moser would not have been able to manage his publication list, which is estimated at over 500 titles, without the aid he had created. Moser was also one of the first theorists of the card box. Under the heading "My way of collecting materials for future writings", he himself described the algorithms with which he filled his "card boxes".

Johann Jacob Moser was a commonplace book keeper who referenced his system as a means of inventio. He wrote about how he collected material for future writing and described the ways in which he filled his "card boxes".

I'm curious what his exact method was and if it could be called an early precursor of the zettelkasten?

Just as physics and engineering professors don't always rely on the mathematics department to teach all the mathematics that students should know, neither should any department rely on the English department to teach students how to take notes.

He's railing against the loss of theory for use over time and translation.

similar to me and note taking...

https://www.mattmaldre.com/2021/09/13/annotate-articles-online/

I love that Matt is using this tool and his annotated notes to write new material based on things he's read.

For those curious about the idea of what students might do with the notes and annotations they're making in the margins of their texts using Hypothes.is, I would submit that Dan Allosso's OER handbook How to Make Notes and Write (Minnesota State Pressbooks, 2022) may be a very useful place to turn. https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/write/

It provides some concrete advice on the topic of once you've highlighted and annotated various texts for a course, how might you then turn your new understanding, ideas, and extant thinking work into a blogpost, essay, term paper or thesis.

For a similar, but alternative take, the book How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking by Sönke Ahrens (Create Space, 2017) may also be helpful as well. This text however requires purchase via Amazon and doesn't carry the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (by-nc-sa 4.0) license that Dr. Allosso's does.

In addition to the online copy of the book, there's an annotatable .pdf copy available here: http://docdrop.org/pdf/How-to-Make-Notes-and-Write---Allosso-Dan-jzdq8.pdf/ though one can download .epub and .pdf copies directly from the Pressbooks site.

Compass Points, a routine for examining propositions.

via https://pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Compass%20Points_0.pdf

• E- excited
• W- worrisome
• N - need to know
• S - stance or suggestion for moving forward

These could be used as a simple set of rules for thumb for evaluating and expanding on ideas in note taking or social annotation settings.

Compare these with the suggestions of Tiago Forte in his book Building a Second Brain. Which is better? More comprehensive? Are there any ideas missing in a broader conceptualization? Is there a better acronymization or analogy for such a technique?

It's easier to write when you know where you're going. As if to underline this Ernest Hemingway would end his writing sessions when he knew where he was going the following day so that it would be easier to pick up the thread of the story and continue on. (sourcing?)

(Why doesn't Forte have a source for this Hemingway anecdote? Where does it come from? He footnotes or annotates far more obscure pieces, why not this?!)

link to - Stephen Covey quote “begin with the end in mind” (did this prefigure the same common advice in narrative circles including Hollywood?)

A missed opportunity to reference the arts of rhetoric here. This book is a clear indication that popular Western culture seems to have lost the knowledge of it.

As a reminder, in the review be sure to look at and critique the invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery of the piece as well as its ethos, pathos, and logos. :)

Barzun, Jacques. Simple and Direct : A Rhetoric for Writers. Revised edition. University of Chicago Press, 1985.

A few weeks back I joined the Schoenberg Institute's ongoing series "Coffee with a Codex" which featured two manuscripts the Penn Libraries have relating to Rhetorica ad Herennium. One is MS Codex 1630, a 15th century copy of the text itself, and MS Codex 1629 which is a 14th century commentary on Rhetorica.

As a few here are interested in some of the older memory texts and having access to older copies from the Renaissance is rare, I thought I'd share some of the resources from that session including photos, descriptions, and the videos themselves which have recently been posted online. For those who are interested in these spaces, I hope this is as much of a treat as I thought it was.

A blog post with some details, links, and great photos: https://schoenberginstitute.org/2022/03/09/ms-codex-1630-ms-codex-1629-rhetoric/

A short video introduction to the MS Codex 1630: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpFbbHgNQ4

And here's the full 30 minute video of the walk through session of both manuscripts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT6Qdgz93Ec&list=PL8e3GREu0zuC-jTFRF27a88SzTQ6fSISy&index=8

Full digital copies of both books and bibliographic details for them can be found below: Ms. Codex 1630: https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9958935643503681

Ms. Codex 1629: https://franklin.library.upenn.edu/catalog/FRANKLIN_9958752123503681

This sort of recombination is also seen in the work of Raymond Llull, though there he did it in a specific combinatorial way and implemented it in his memory rather than on paper.

Literature scholar Edward P.J. Corbett used to command "Imitate, that you may be different!" While his rhetoric and composition textbook may have encouraged students to emulate the masters, this pattern goes back to ancient Greek rhetoricians who also admonished

Link to rhetoric examples in antiquity. Link to the Finding Forrester example.

The compositional approaches mentioned here are those of Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin.

What was Burrough's cut-up-fold-in technique?

Derrida's definition of invention

Footnote:

Sacchini (1614)—further references to “Sacchini” will be to this edition; warm thanks to Helmut Zedelmaier for sharing with me his photocopy of this edition. Further editions include: Sammieli (Saint-Mihiel, Lorraine), 1615; Ingolstadt 1616; Bordeaux 1617; Dillingen 1621; Leipzig 1711 and 1738; and Venetiis Britonum (Vannes, Brittany), 1866. It was translated into French (Sacchini [1786]) and German, Über die Lektüre, ihren Nutzen und die Vortheile sie gehörig anzuwenden, nach dem Lateini- Notes to Pages 70–72 283 schen des Sacchini teutsch bearbeitet und mit einem Anhange begleitet von Herrmann Walchner (Karlsruhe, 1832). I am grateful to Helmut Zedelmaier for the information about the German edition, which I have not seen. Sacchini’s De ratione . . . legendi was a source for Rainierio Carsughi, Ars bene scribendi (Rome, 1709), as discussed in Haskell (2003), 260. For the full range of Jesuit practices of note-taking (including notes taken under dictation) see Nelles (2007)—I am grateful to Paul Nelles for helpful conversations over the years. On Sacchini, see also Dainville (1978), 224–27.

Some florilegia were used as handbooks to teach composition. Those with poetic excerpts were used to teach prosody while others specialized in prose.

Examples of these sorts of florilegia include Micon Centulensis' Opus prosodiacum from the mid-ninth century and a Collectanea by Heiric who wrote under dictation from Lupus of Ferrières, ca. 859–62.

It shouldn't escape the mnemonists' attention that while Wozniak recognizes some basic attributes of memory and mnemonics, he obviously isn't steeped in the traditions of the art of memory. Specifically he doesn't seem to be aware of associative methods beyond peg systems and some low level basics which he's come across via Tony Buzan. He's also missing the major system and the method of loci in general. However, when looking at his list of "Twenty rules of formulating knowledge", the majority of the items on the list are either heavily informed by the memory canon within classical rhetoric. Some of the items on the list actually move in an opposite direction from good memory principles (his admonitions against sets and enumeration), but it's because Wozniak is explicitly missing some of the basic mnemotechnical tools.

Have any writers on space repetition gone beyond Wozniak's state of the art with respect to mnemotechniques before?

I had started it and lost it due to a technical glitch, but it might be worth highlighting the places where Wozniak's list either directly dovetails or diverges from the arts of memory. His list could be dramatically improved and compressed by brining it closer in line with the fourth canon of rhetoric.

Ask and ye shall receive!

https://uxdesign.cc/the-power-of-seeing-only-the-questions-in-a-piece-of-writing-8f486d2c6d7d

I made a web tool that takes a piece of writing and strips out everything but the questions: https://t.co/i8FsoFwPt4<br><br>Here's the first chapter of Moby Dick<br><br>Quite fascinating to see this aspect of a literary style pic.twitter.com/tHrHA7jsdW

— Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99) February 27, 2022

Link to [[searching for questions while reading]]

Proper note taking provides one with a permanent fount of interesting and exciting ideas to work on.

The point of good tools of thought is to allow one to keep track of the ever increasing flood of information that also allows them to juxtapose or combine ideas in novel and interesting ways. Further, this should provide them with a means of generating and then improving upon their new ideas.

The forms of rational, skeptical, empirical and conversational forms of debate popularized by the Enlightenment which saw the rejection of arbitrary authority were influenced by the Haudenosaunee nations of Americans.

Interesting to see the reflexive political fallout of this reoccurring with the political right in America beginning in the early 2000s through the 2020s. It's almost as if the Republican party and religious right never experienced the Enlightenment and are still living in the 1700s.

Curious that in modern culture I think of the Jesuits as the embodiment of rationalist, skeptical argumentation and thought now. Apparently they were dramatically transformed since that time.

A list of means of persuasiveness:

• use of logical argumentation
• appeal to sentiment
• whipping up passions
• deploying poetic metaphors
• appeal to mythology, proverbial or ancient wisdom
• irony
• indirection
• humor
• insult
• prophecy/revelation
• appeal to the rhetorical tradition to which the speaker belongs (pathos, ethos, etc.)
• presumed disposition of the audience

What others are there?

Certainly Donald Trump didn't use logical argumentation. He didn't even frame things as being for something so much as being against other things.

Jesuit missionaries during the Englightement were impressed with the level of rhetoric and argument that the indigenous Americans had without recourse to western rhetoric.

https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021193157/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html

Manfred Kuehn looks at Karl Kraus' criticism of the idea of a zettelkasten as a tool which can be misused.

Of course this begs the question of what one is using their index card catalog for? Are you using it as a rhetorical thinking and creation device or simply a second memory?

Seneca on Gathering Ideas by Manfred Kuehn on Monday, December 24, 2007 https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/seneca-on-gathering-ideas.html

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021191724/https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/seneca-on-gathering-ideas.html

A quick look at how some of the ancient ideas of rhetoric may affect one's note taking and thinking. I love that this is one of his first posts on a blog on note taking. Too many miss this history.r

Using a completely blank page as the start of any creative endeavor is a miserable choice for writing. Start with some other object and annotate either on it or next to it. Look at something else as a base. Starting with blank nothing is a recipe for loneliness and disaster. So-called distraction free writing tools are the worst.

Didn't Ernest Hemmingway analogize staring at a blank page like facing a white bull? There is a litany of quotes about writers facing the blank page.

Why not, instead, use the advice of ancient rhetors by starting with the best? Become a bee and collect the best materials for your honey first. If we don't look to them, then perhaps follow the lesson taught by Benjamin Franklin on writing or the same lesson repeated in the movie Finding Forrester. Start with someone else's work and rewrite that until you find your own words. This is what makes writing while annotating so easy and simple. You've got a nice tapestry of textures to begin your work.

Giving birth to something fully formed as if from the head of Zeus is a fallacy. It only works for the gods.

Perhaps its just that modern writers have been so long divorced from the ideas of classical rhetoric that they're making the process so much harder than it needs to be. Do writers know what they really need in the first place? Perhaps they've been putting the cart before the horse for too long.

Rethinking one's writing process to start at the moment of reading and annotation is possibly a far better method for composition? Then instead of needing to do the work of coming up with an idea and then researching toward one's idea and then creating something de novo, one can delve into one's notes of things they know have previously been of interest to them. By already being of interest or answering questions they've previously asked themselves and had interest in pursuing, they might make the load of work more evenly spread across their lives rather than designing a massive mountain of a problem first and then attempting to scale it after the fact.

By building the mountain from the start, it then isn't a problem to be solved, just a vista from which to stand and survey the area.

Deepti Gurdasani. (2021, December 23). Some brief thoughts on the concerning relativism I’ve seen creeping into media, and scientific rhetoric over the past 20 months or so—The idea that things are ok because they’re better relative to a point where things got really really bad. 🧵 [Tweet]. @dgurdasani1. https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1474042179110772736

https://blogs.orient.ox.ac.uk/kila/2010/10/09/authors-plagiarists-or-tradents/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'> Dr. Tamar Marvin </span> in "I went looking for work on tradents in Bavli, found this! "Anyone who has read...Tibetan literature will be familiar with...the ubiquitous verbatim repetition of phrases, sections, literary structures, and even entire chapters, across many different texts" https://t.co/eeN4qoTqss" (<time class='dt-published'>12/09/2021 09:33:48</time>)</cite></small>

Macroforms are the literary constructions which we might consider anthologies composed of smaller building blocks of lemmata and microforms. These smaller forms are rhetorically built up into larger forms to make "new" literary works or commentaries on prior works.

These can be compared to Western rhetorical traditions going back to Seneca the Younger in Epistulae morales

"We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says, 'pack close the flowering honey | And swell their cells with nectar sweet.' "

He's essentially saying, read the best, take their thoughts and ideas, consume them, make them your own."

Generations later in ~430 CE, Macrobius in his Saturnalia repeated the same idea and even analogy (he assuredly read Seneca, though he obviously didn't acknowledge him):

"You should not count it a fault if I shall set out the borrowings from a miscellaneous reading in the authors' own words... sometimes set out plainly in my own words and sometimes faithfully recorded in the actual words of the old writers... We ought in some sort to imitate bees; and just as they, in their wandering to and fro, sip the flowers, then arrange their spoil and distribute it among the honeycombs, and transform the various juices to a single flavor by some mixing with them a property of their own being, so I too shall put into writing all that I have acquired in the varied course of my reading... For not only does arrangement help the memory, but the actual process of arrangement, accompanied by a kind of mental fermentation which serves to season the whole, blends the diverse extracts to make a single flavor; with the result that, even if the sources are evident, what we get in the end is still something clearly different from those known sources."

(cross reference: https://hyp.is/mCsl9voQEeuP3t8jNOyAvw/maggieappleton.com/echo-narcissus)

Tradents in Tibetan religious literature often copied unattributed texts forward and backward in time without attribution. They often weren't inventing new material, but copying it forward.

This seems incredibly similar to the traditions of oral cultures as explored by Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the work on orality which was followed up by Walter Ong and others. Examples include the poets known as Homer in the Greek Tradition and the guslars of Yugoslavia.

catachresis : the use of a word in a way that is not correct, for example, the use of mitigate for militate.

I've not seen it argued elsewhere (yet), but I would make a case that the majority of drolleries weren't so much comment on themes in text as that they were loci placed into the books at either intervals or in particular locations as part of the practice of the art of memory. They act as signposts to which the reader can more easily memorize portions of books by attaching the ideas on those pages to the dramatic and absurd images painted into them as suggested by Rhetorica ad Herennium (https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL403/1954/volume.xml).

Cross reference: The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates (University of Chicago, 1966).for the historical practice of memory in the West, though she doesn't mention drolleries at all.

cc: @remikalir

Where exactly do we situate note taking? Certainly within the space of rhetoric, but also as Ann M. Blair suggests within the history of reading.

What else? manuscript studies, psychology, others?

So very few modern sources describe annotation or note taking in these terms.

I find often in my annotations, the most recent one just above is such a one, where I start with a tiny kernel of an idea and then my brain begins warming up and I put down some additional thoughts. These can sometimes build and turn into multiple sentences or paragraphs, other times they sit and need further work. But either way, with some work they may turn into something altogether different than what the original author intended or discussed.

These are the things I want to keep, expand upon, and integrate into larger works or juxtapose with other broader ideas and themes in the things I am writing about.

Sadly, we're just not teaching students or writers these tidbits or habits anymore.

Sönke Ahrens mentions this idea in his book about Smart Notes. When one is asked to write an essay or a paper it is immensely difficult to have a perch on which to begin. But if one has been taking notes about their reading which is of direct interest to them and which can be highly personal, then it is incredibly easy to have a starting block against which to push to begin what can be either a short sprint or a terrific marathon.

This pattern can be seen by many bloggers who surf a bit of the web, read what others have written, and use those ideas and spaces as a place to write or create their own comments.

Certainly this can involve some work, but it's always nicer when the muses visit and the words begin to flow.

I've now written so much here in this annotation that this note here, is another example of this phenomenon.

With some hope, by moving this annotation into my commonplace book (or if you prefer the words notebook, blog, zettelkasten, digital garden, wiki, etc.) I will have it to reflect and expand upon later, but it'll also be a significant piece of text which I might move into a longer essay and edit a bit to make a piece of my own.

With luck, I may be able to remedy some of the modern note taking treatises and restore some of what we've lost from older traditions to reframe them in an more logical light for modern students.

I recall being lucky enough to work around teachers insisting I use note cards and references in my sixth grade classes, but it was never explained to me exactly what this exercise was meant to engender. It was as if they were providing the ingredients for a recipe, but had somehow managed to leave off the narrative about what to do with those ingredients, how things were supposed to be washed, handled, prepared, mixed, chopped, etc. I always felt that I was baking blind with no directions as to temperature or time. Fortunately my memory for reading on shorter time scales was better than my peers and it was only that which saved my dishes from ruin.

I've come to see note taking as beginning expanded conversations with the text on the page and the other texts in my notebooks. Annotations in the the margins slowly build to become something else of my own making.

We might compare this with the more recent movement of social annotation in the digital pedagogy space. This serves a related master, but seems a bit more tangent to it. The goal of social annotation seems to be to help engage students in their texts as a group. Reading for many of these students may be more foreign than it is to me and many other academics who make trade with it. Thus social annotation helps turn that reading into a conversation between peers and their text. By engaging with the text and each other, they get something more out of it than they might have if left to their own devices. The piece I feel is missing here is the modeling of the next several steps to the broader commonplacing tradition. Once a student has begun the path of allowing their ideas to have sex with the ideas they find on the page or with their colleagues, what do they do next? Are they being taught to revisit their notes and ideas? Sift them? Expand upon them. Place them in a storehouse of their best materials where they can later be used to write those longer essays, chapters, or books which may benefit them later?

How might we build these next pieces into these curricula of social annotation to continue building on these ideas and principles?

I've run across Henry Peacham, the younger, in other contexts and his father within the context of rhetoric and commonplacing.

This is an explanation of my introduction...

I love this outline/syllabus for creating a commonplace book (as a potential replacement for a term paper).

I'd be curious to see those who are using Hypothes.is as a communal reading tool in coursework utilize this outline (or similar ones) in combination with their annotation practices.

Curating one's annotations and placing them into a commonplace book or zettelkasten would be a fantastic rhetorical exercise to extend the value of one's notes and ideas.

The history of rhetoric is littered with suggestions to imitate. Early commonplace book handbooks encouraged it heavily.

Cross reference: https://hyp.is/mCsl9voQEeuP3t8jNOyAvw/maggieappleton.com/echo-narcissus

I LOVE the dysfunctional thought process of this statement. This is Social Engineering 101. An educated public not drinking the cool-aid of Neoliberalism, aristocracy or silver-spoon wealth would realize the deception of that statement simply by the fact that the US is already a socialistic ideological nation in the same way the US is already a democracy or that the US is already a capitalist ideological nation. Point being: The US is like a "mutt", meaning it's not a pure bred anything and will never be a pure anything.

The original United States through the early 1970's represented the true American experiment and dream. The US (America) created opportunity and limited support for impoverished citizens and understood the strength and meaning of leadership (taking care of it's own). Having a somewhat balanced (more perceived) societal ideology for the US allowed America's unique nature to shine strong. Modern America (early 1980's to current) is not and should not be compared to what I call the Original America. Modern America is a nation corrupted by wealth and power. Modern America does not shine brightly anymore, the experiment is over and old school European aristocracy (wealth, status, power) rules the land. The problem is the public does not realize the extent of damage done to America and will completely forget within 2 generations.

The baby-boomer generation is the last representation of original America and makes up the largest demographic in our nations history. Boomers hold the true America in their hearts and minds. The real Patriotism and ideology derived from the original America has become the weapon of choice for those wishing to exploit the the concept of America past. Meaningless rhetoric tied to patriotic ideals is behind the controlled social engineering of today.

The statement above is a great example of meaningless rhetorical pandering with ambiguous words and phrases from a morally corrupt 1 to 2% of the new aristocracy grabbing power in America.

the way through the eighteenth century.

Direct linguistic analogies for commonplacing one's notes and the placing of ideas into the memory via the word locus.

This brings up the idea of how much architects did or didn't build and structure their spaces with the ideas of memoria within rhetoric?

https://collect.readwriterespond.com/how-to-remember-more-of-what-you-read/

Some useful looking links here. Thanks Aaron.

I've been digging deeper and deeper into some of the topics and sub-topics.

The biggest problem I've seen thus far is a lot of wanna-be experts and influencers (especially within the Roam Research space) touching on the very surface of problem. I've seen more interesting and serious people within the Obsidian community sharing their personal practices and finding pieces of that useful.

The second issue may be that different things work somewhat differently for different people, none of whom are using the same tools or even general systems. Not all of them have the same end goals either. Part of the key is finding something useful that works for you or modifying something slowly over time to get it to work for you.

At the end of the day your website holds the true answer: read, write, respond (along with the implied "repeat" at the end).

One of the best and most thorough prescriptions I've seen is Sönke Ahrens' book which he's written after several years of using and researching a few particular systems.

I've been finding some useful tidbits from my own experience and research into the history of note taking and commonplace book traditions. The memory portion intrigues me a lot as well as I've done quite a lot of research into historical methods of mnemonics and memory traditions. Naturally the ancient Greeks had most of this all down within the topic of rhetoric, but culturally we seem to have unbundled and lost a lot of our own traditions with changes in our educational system over time.

How To Do Sketchnoting (Even If You "Can't Draw"!)

a lesson with Emily Mills of the Sketchnote Academy

video

Types of Sketchnotes

• Lecture based
• Experience based

Skills for sketchnotes

• Listening
  • looking for ideas, high level
• Writing
• Drawing

Pairing images and words together to be dynamic and memorable.

One doesn't need to be the greatest artist to do sketchnotes.

memorable >> masterpiece recognizable >> realistic big ideas >> nitty gritty

Basic drawing

Seven building blocks for drawing

• dot
• straight line
• crooked line
• curvy line
• circle
• triangle
• square

Rules

• The fewer elements, the easier
• Rearrange rotate, reorient shapes

People

• standard stick person
• A person
• oval person
• star person

Containers and connectors

Boxes are boring, so add frames or more interesting Use containers to separate information that is different from the rest or to highlight.

• boxes
• frames
• nails/thumbtacks
• star "pow" outline
• box with a shadow

Tell people where to read next

• Create a really clear header
• help people with connectors (dotted lines, arrows, numbering)

Start out small first as it's more intimidating to use bigger formats

Tools

• Sketchone marker (thin point ink, pigment or permanent and not water-based, otherwise bleedover in coloring)
• Tombow dual brush markers for color
  • two grey tones, one lighter and one darker
  • small handful of colors (red, blue, yellow, green)

How to Sketchnote

• Step 1: Header
• Step 2: Layout (top to bottom/left to right is usually more intuitive) Pre-plan this. Think about connectors.
• Step 3: Consistency
  • headers, characters, size of writing,
• Step 4: Refine
  • check spelling
  • whiteout for mess ups (gellyroll white gel pen)
  • ensure connectors are obvious
• Step 5: Guiding shapes (to help flow of information on page)
  • stippling
  • cloud outlines
  • lines in the negative space (also creates contrast)
• Step 6: Coloring in
  • greys first, dark then light
  • highlighting connectors
  • shadows on boxes, ribbons, connectors
  • color should be more of a highlight than a background filler (it's not a coloring book)

Higher contrast notes are better

Resources

• 👉🏻 Find Emily (and her awesome resources!) at https://www.emilyamills.com
• 👉🏻 The Sketchnote Academy free course: https://www.sketchnoteacademy.com
• 👉🏻 The Art of Visual Note taking by Emily Mills

This is also related to the ideas of invention as well as the analogy of the bee in relation to commonplaces. Link this to the bee analogy of Seneca the Younger and Macrobius in Saturnalia.

I'll note that I'm often reading for the inventio. It's not always what one can extract, but what interesting ideas that might be sparked anew.

Akhther, N. (2021). Internet Memes as Form of Cultural Discourse: A Rhetorical Analysis on Facebook. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/sx6t7

I'll definitely grant this and admit that there may be independent invention or re-discovery of ideas.

However, I'll also mention that it's far, far less likely that any of these people truly invented very much novel along the way, particularly since Western culture has been swimming in the proverbial waters of writing, rhetoric, and the commonplace book tradition for so long that we too often forget that we're actually swimming in water.

It's incredibly easy to reinvent the wheel when everything around you is made of circles, hubs, and axles.

George Carlin's comic craft was to take broad themes and the minutiae of life and craft it together with careful language.

I'm glad to see that reading makes an appearance here, if only a nodding one. Reading and subsequently annotating and thinking about my reading takes up a significant portion of time and labor which goes into my ultimate writing. Reading and annotating is the underlying bedrock for my rhetorical inventio process. Where would I be without it?

I'm reminded here of a portion of Benjamin Franklin's passage in his Autobiography where he describes his writing process and work to improve:

About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator.[18] It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method of the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious. My time for these exercises and for reading was at night, after work or before it began in the morning, or on Sundays, when I contrived to be in the printing-house alone, evading as much as I could the common attendance on public worship which my father used to exact of me when I was under his care, and which indeed I still thought a duty, thought I could not, as it seemed to me, afford time to practise it.

Fred Reynolds - Emeritus, City College of CUNY, USA aka John Frederick Reynolds freynolds@ccny.cuny.edu

James J. Murphy, a fairly prolific writer on renaissance rhetoric in general

I've generally gleaned most of the gist of this from Yates directly myself.

I've dipped into some of Carruthers' work, but not the others yet, though based on our present situation of memory, I can see that this is likely the case.

I want to pull up the other researchers he mentions here to read their material as well.

Tollefson, J. (2021, April 16). The race to curb the spread of COVID vaccine disinformation. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00997-x?error=cookies_not_supported&code=0d3302c0-59b3-4065-8835-2a6d99ca35cc

The real reason for using a dictionary.

This appears to be the longer book form of the prior paper I'd noticed. I'll buy and download a copy shortly.

Rhetoric - Government attack - Spin

Powerful Headline (words) from a Washington Post article under Economic Policy. WORDS.....! Words..... When you study Legal Theory you learn that "words" play a significant role in all aspects of social order.

Controlling the rhetoric with consistent narrative

This statement simply implies the use of consistent narrative (story) to allow control of the rhetoric. Narrative can be viewed as believable while Rhetoric is a general pejorative. When the rhetoric is mis or dis-information the narrative must be credible.

Main stream media (MSM) has held a long-term standing across the world as being credible. This standing is eroding. It has eroded considerably over the last 25 years among critical thinkers and the general population has started to take notice.

I question everything from MSM especially when narrative is duplicated with identical rhetoric across known government media assets. History is a wonderful thing when searching for Truth. Events in historical time periods can be researched, parsed and studied for patterns based on future evidence and outcomes.

Information "Spin" is real and happens for one purpose, that purpose is to benefit a position, agenda, person, plan, etc., by manipulating (advertising, PR, propaganda) information. Spin is difficult to refute without hard facts. Spin has a short-term shelf life, but that is all it needs to chart a new course, set the "ball" in motion so to say.

History allows Truth to overcome Spin.

Again, it is not at all clear what is meant by this statement. Equity in academia is an incredibly important goal. This statement currently reads like unsubstantiated rhetoric. Libraries, Institutions and funders have found that the unintended consequences of deficient deals with publishers supported by their funds can include inequitable access to no-additional-cost publishing. However, the intention of the Rights Retention Strategy (RRS) is to arm all authors with detailed knowledge of their rights to ensure they have the same minimum opportunity to widely disseminate their work. Furthermore, by providing a version of an output with a CC BY license there is greater equity around accessing the research and therefore greater opportunity to build on it for public benefit, making a more equitable environment for all. The version of record (VoR) remains important in this scenario, so more equitable access should not undermine the sustainability of journals and platforms which are valued.

It’s not entirely clear what is meant by this statement. This is incredibly inflammatory rhetoric for most academics who take academic freedom very seriously - for very good reasons. However, the academic has the freedom not to accept a grant if they fundamentally disagree with the funder’s desired approach to effective dissemination of the research they support. Furthermore, the rights retention strategy (RRS) is in place to give the authors more freedom of choice over what happens to the version of record (VoR). Because of the RRS, the author can submit to the most appropriate journal for the research regardless of whether it explicitly provides a compliant route to publication (assuming the journal takes the submission forwards) or whether or not the author can access funds to pay a publication charge (APC) in a hybrid subscription journal.

What rhetoricians call "Constitutive Rhetoric"

Another example from @WillGrinnell: Glitch Art

Begins with parallel structure a rhetorical device used throughout. With students I'd ask them to identify other examples in letter. Discuss parallelism in sermon construction and its emotionally evocative power and its use by Baldwin, King, and Obama. Connect to musicality and memory--important cultural literary structures when literature is spoken rather than read. Can connect to Akhmatova social/political context. Note the intimacy of POV. There's a duality in the expository form--it's addressed to one but published to many. Why is this an effective voice for the persona? How would you describe the persona?

I imagine she had many enemies for all of these reasons, and it's interesting and gratifying to see her ethos grew throughout her life as well as her confidence. She clearly took a lot of risks to say what she felt needed to be said, and the reward was her progress as a rhetor.